Mean What You Say: Defining and Integrating Personalized, Blended and Competency Education

This paper provides a scan of the literature to expand the knowledge base for the field of online, blended, and competency-based education. The goal of the paper is to explain the nuances of key terms used across the field of K-12 education related to personalized, blended and competency education, and how the ideas integrate in order to create new learning models. Read this paper to make sense of these terms and discover how they fit together.

This paper defines personalized learning and its characteristics; describes blended learning and how it supports personalization; and discusses how the two concepts are different. The report then describes how competency education is the foundation for the idea of systemic transformation to new learning models that are student-centered, and the critical role standards play in structurally supporting personalized, blended and competency-based learning that is both rigorous and world-class.